Stories circulated for years in Pittsburgh about the exploits of a Jewish gangster known as “Kid” Angel.  During the 1920s and 1930s, Angel  and his gambling exploits were legendary. “Over town there’s a lad who has been active around the bookie shops where the race track fans pick the horses,” wrote Post-Gazette investigative reporter Ray Sprigle in 1936. ” [Harry] Angel is his name, but everyone knows him as Kid Angel.”

This visit to #MobsBurgh re-introduces Kid Angel to Pittsburgh readers.

The Kid Was No Angel

Harry “Kid” Angel (1889-1964) was born in Tennessee. By 1900, his parents, Russian immigrants Morris (c. 1860-1935) and Julia (or Goldie) Angel, were living in Pittsburgh’s Lower Hill District.  Morris was a produce huckster who sold his wares throughout the city from a horse-drawn cart. In 1910, the U.S. Census documented Morris living at 14 Perry Street in a home he bought in 1906, around the time that he married Yetta (c. 1882-1967) Cohen, his second wife.

The Angels were a large family. Julia had at least six children before her marriage to Morris ended (it is unclear as of this writing whether she died or they divorced) and Yetta had three children. Pittsburgh journalists mused about the family’s size in 1932 after police were summoned to a row in the courthouse. An argument had erupted over the weekly stipend that the elderly Morris was supposed to receive. Though Morris had a few brushes with the law, including a 1916 fine for hawking his wares too loudly, he doesn’t appear to have been involved in any of the activities for which his son Harry became infamous.

Harry, on the other hand, was 24 when he first appeared in a Pittsburgh newspaper for an arrest as a “suspicious person.” The Post-Gazette reported on March 24, 1913, that Angel’s wife alleged that he was planning to desert her. “When arrested Angel had a ticket for New York in his pocket,” the paper wrote. “Mrs. Angel alleges that there is another woman in the case.”

A decade later, Pittsburgh newspapers reported that Harry Angel was openly operating a new gambling hall with impunity. The same week that the Pittsburgh City Council opened an investigation into police corruption, Angel opened a new gambling house in the Hill. “Within the past week a gambling house has opened in Roberts street near Center avenue,” the Post wrote. “It is on the second floor above a restaurant, and does a rushing business. The proprietor is known as ‘Kid,’ and he is the ‘Angel’ of the place.”

Pittsburgh police officials testified that they visited the property after the article was published and they found no evidence of gambling there. Angel also testified and he denied the accusations. “He admitted, however, that there were gambling tables on the second floor, but they were used only in a summer camp,” The Post wrote.

About the same time as Angel was running the gambling operation out of the Roberts Street address, he went into business with another Hill District racketeer, Frank “Froy” Nathan. Together they operated a billiards hall that fronted for their gambling business (dice, cards, sports book, and later, numbers). City directories show them doing business alternately as “Nathan and Angel” and “Angel and Nathan.” Their establishment was located in a brick building at 1701 Centre Avenue.

Journalists (and sometimes the police) continued dogging Angel through the 1920s. In 1925 Angel was convicted in federal court for possessing 150 gallons of “moonshine whiskey,” four 100-gallon stills, and 140 barrels of mash. Angel and three others stood trial after their arrest in Homestead a year earlier. The jury, however, acquitted them of manufacturing the liquor.

Sometime in the 1920s, a Hill District woman tearfully approached Anna B. Heldman, a public health nurse who became the director of personal service for the Irene Kaufmann Settlement. “Heldie” as she was affectionately known also was called the “Angel of the Hill District” for her years of selfless service.

An undated manuscript in the Irene Kaufmann Settlement papers archived in the Rauh Jewish Archives of the Heinz History Center recounts the episode and Heldman’s encounter with the other Hill District’s other “Angel”:

One day a woman came to Heldie in tears. She said that her husband had come home on payday with no money because he had stopped off at Kid Angel’s gambling hall and lost his entire pay. She begged Heldie to make the man stop gambling and Heldie said she would see what she could do. Instead of going to the husband, Heldie went straight to Kid Angel’s place. In those days, even the toughest racketeers had a healthy respect for Heldie. She demanded that Kid Angel give her the money the husband had lost, and he gave it back to her. When Heldie took the money to the wife, the woman said to her, “Thank you for getting this money for me, but how will this stop my husband from gambling?” Heldie knew what she was doing. She told the woman, “After the way I took this money away from Kid Angel, the next time your husband tries to go in there to gamble, the Kid will throw him out!”

In the first part of 1930, Angel and Nathan were arrested for embracery: tampering with a jury in a case involving the wife of a Pittsburgh police officer. The charges were dropped after a magistrate concluded there was insufficient evidence connecting Angel to the attempt to influence a juror.

By the summer, Angel was cooperating with a handful of other numbers bankers and gamblers to open a greyhound racing track near Aspinwall. Angel, along with Frank Nathan, Samuel Greenburg, and Phil Lang (a German whose wealthy family was in the leather business), financed the rental of property from an amusement park and the construction of a racetrack and grandstands. Their enterprise was fronted by two businessmen and the track opened July 4, 1930 and a series of mishaps forced the track to close one month later.

During the 1930s, Angel cemented his position as a leader in Pittsburgh’s gambling rackets and as a numbers boss. And, he continued to operate openly without any serious repercussions from law enforcement. Reporter Sprigle in 1936 wrote that Angel and his partner, Frank Nathan, collected protection money for Pittsburgh politicians from numbers Northside numbers writers. The money went into campaign coffers and it kept the city’s police at bay.

A Family Business

Angel’s son Herbert (1908-1986) followed his father into the family business in the 1930s. Between 1934 and 1942, Herbert Angel was arrested on multiple gambling charges and once, in 1938, for shooting at someone over what police described as “an old grudge.”

In August 1942, Herbert was arrested in his father’s Centre Avenue billiards hall. The Pittsburgh Press reported,

Detectives said they found 30 men playing cards in a rear room of Angel’s Pool and Billiard Parlor when they raided the establishment. Also found were 50 numbers slips and a dice table. Several frequenters escaped through windows during the raid, detectives said.

Herbert was convicted, fined $300, and sentenced to three months in jail in November 1942. The next month, he was paroled so that he could take his critically ill son to Florida. By that time, the Angels had been spending lots of time in Miami, according to the social pages in Pittsburgh’s Jewish newspapers.

Things might have been getting too hot in Pittsburgh for the Angels. Both Harry and Herbert moved their families to Miami. They used the skills they honed in Pittsburgh to enter the Florida city’s hospitality industry, opening bars and restaurants and quickly racking up arrests for liquor and gambling violations.

In 1952, Herbert became the only Miami Beach resident to register with the Internal Revenue Service as a gambler and receive a “gambling stamp.” By that time, he was well known as the local racket’s “layoff man,” according to Miami newspapers. (Laying-off bets reduced the risks numbers bankers and sports bookmakers faced with large bets.)

Throughout the 1950s, the police continued to raid Angel’s Miami area establishments, yet he escaped serious charges and imprisonment. In 1967, the Miami Herald described Herbert as a “long-protected bookie kingpin.” It seems like the junior Angel was enjoying the same type of protection that his father had received in Pittsburgh during the 1920s and 1930s.

The End of an Era

Harry “Kid” Angel died in Miami in 1964 at age 74. Just a few years earlier, the Miami News reported that Angel and his second wife, Ella, were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary. If the few newspaper reports from the early 1960s are accurate, the father-son interstate crime duo continued their exploits almost until the end of Kid Angel’s life. In 1960, the pair were arrested on gambling charges. A newspaper account described Harry, 71, and Herbert, 51, as brothers when they were arrested: “Harry Angel told officers he was in the apartment ‘just to bring some medicines to my brother’.” In its obituary for Kid Angel, the Miami News described him as a “retired restaurant and bar owner.”

Herbert Angel died in Miami in 1986. He remained in the gambling business until at least 1971, when he was arrested along with five others, including Miami radio personality Jerry “Sonny” Hirsch, on gambling charges. 

Harry “Kid” Angel was one of Pittsburgh’s most colorful racketeers. His criminal career spanned five decades and at least two states. While in Pittsburgh he was part of a loosely organized syndicate of Jewish racketeers who made indelible impressions in the city’s political, economic, and cultural spheres for most of the twentieth century.

© 2020 D.S. Rotenstein

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